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CONTENT:

1 - CENTRAL & EASTERN AFRICA: World Bank grants region $20 million to fight

HIV/AIDS

1 - CENTRAL & EASTERN AFRICA: World Bank grants region $20 million to fight

HIV/AIDS

KAMPALA, 18 March (PLUSNEWS) - The World Bank has announced a US $20-million

grant to boost the fight against HIV/AIDS in six countries in Africa's Great

Lakes region, which are home to an estimated six million people living with the

condition.

The region is home to 3 million children orphaned or made vulnerable by the

pandemic.

In a statement issued on Tuesday in Washington D.C., the World Bank said the

grant would be under a new project known as the Great Lakes Initiative on

HIV/AIDS (GLIA).

The bank said the project would finance " prevention, care, and treatment

programmes for large numbers of refugees, migrant and transport workers, highly

infected groups, and others which move between the Great Lakes countries " .

The new project would also coordinate regional resources, merge regional

HIV/AIDS approaches with national efforts, and monitor and evaluate regional

efforts in Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania

and Uganda.

" Addressing HIV/AIDS solely on a country-by-country basis ignores large-scale

migration across long, unguarded borders, and other regional realities, and

misses an opportunity to make national programs more effective through

transnational cooperation, " said Hansen, the manager of the World Bank's

Multi-country HIV/AIDS Programme for Africa.

The multi-country programme has committed at least $1 billion in grants, loans,

and credits to 29 Africa countries since September 2000.

" This project will add greatly to the reach and impact of national HIV/AIDS

resources and programmes in a region of the world where HIV/AIDS has caused so

much human misery and loss, " Hansen added.

The bank said the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR),

working with an estimated 6.5 million refugees and internally displaced persons

(IDPs) within the region, would get $8 million out of this grant to widen its

HIV/AIDS work.

The bank said the region's large numbers of people living with HIV/AIDS were

straining national economies as well as health systems, which, it said, could

offer only limited access to treatment for both AIDS and " opportunistic "

illnesses, such as tuberculosis.

" HIV/AIDS is dramatically fuelling a regional TB epidemic with up to 75 percent

of TB patients in some countries co-infected, " the bank said. " This is a

particularly serious problem amongst displaced people in the region who are

living in extremely difficult conditions. "

It said DRC, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda were among the nine highest TB burdened

countries in sub-Sahara Africa, where national economies were among the poorest,

with $208 as their average per capita earnings.

The GLIA project includes support to HIV/AIDS related networks, with an

allocation of $3 million. This would involve reaching long distance transport

workers, communities and groups associated with them, as well as networks of

people living with HIV/AIDS.

Another component, also of $3 million, would go to support regional health

sector collaboration by helping to harmonise regional HIV/AIDS-related health

sector policies and protocols across the six countries, along with sharing

programme information, monitoring and evaluation, as well as training and pilot

activities.

The last component, of $6 million, would handle management, capacity

strengthening, monitoring and evaluation and reporting to help strengthen the

institutional capacity of the project.

" The GLIA governments recognise the need to go beyond these modest efforts to

create coordinated programmes and policies to better fight their HIV/AIDS

pandemics, " the World Bank said.

" We will only have concerted national success if there is cooperation, knowledge

sharing and policy harmonisation across borders, " Pamphile Kantabaze, the

project co-task team leader and a senior operations officer in the World Bank's

Burundi mission, was quoted as saying.

She added: " With limited financial and human resources to deal with the enormous

HIV/AIDS tasks we collectively face in the Great Lakes, this collaboration is

vital to all. "

The GLIA project is the third cross-border, regional programme approved under

the World Bank's Multi-country HIV/AIDS Programme (MAP) for Africa in the last

18 months.

In August 2004, the African Regional Capacity-Building Network for HIV/AIDS

Prevention, Treatment, and Care project provided a $10-million grant to finance

expanded training health care workers in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania.

In November 2003, the Bank approved a $16.6-million grant to finance HIV/AIDS

prevention, treatment and care services for risk groups along the heavily

travelled Abidjan-Lagos corridor in western sub-Saharan Africa.

The UNHCR issued a statement on Friday in which it said the GLIA project was a

joint effort by the World Bank, the UNAIDS Secretariat, UNHCR and governments in

the region through their national AIDS programmes.

" GLIA is a new regional organisation, fully-owned, and will be operated by its

six member countries, " UNHCR said.

" The coming together of these countries to fight a common enemy - the HIV virus

- is a historic event for the Great Lakes region, their people, and for the

World Bank, " Seifman, the project co-task team Leader and a senior

advisor in the World Bank's AIDS Campaign Team for Africa, said.

Programmes for refugees, returnees and surrounding communities make up the

biggest component of the grant, with $8 million dedicated to these communities

over four years. It said UNCHR would receive $5 million of these funds for its

work with refugees and returnees in the six countries, while the remaining $3

million would supplement countries' existing World Bank grants for work with

local host populations.

[ENDS]

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